Frits van Paasschen

Frits van Paasschen, Former CEO, Starwood Inc.; excerpted from an interview with the National Museum of American History, January 9, 2015.

I was born in the small town outside of Leiden in the Netherlands, which is called Oegstgeest. Both of my parents were born in Indonesia in the 1930s, which at the time was a Dutch colony. They had a wonderful youth in Indonesia, until the invasion by the Japanese, and spent about three-and-a-half years in Japanese internment camps. My mother then actually moved to Canada and Curacao and eventually back to the Netherlands. My father, as a refugee, went to Australia. They had the opportunity to come to the U.S., for their belief that there was no safer place to be in the world then the U.S., [and] that I and my sister would have the opportunity to live a better, safer life than they had.

My father was a medical student and at first had a Fulbright Scholarship, which brought him to Altoona, Pennsylvania. After the year scholarship was up, my parents returned to the Netherlands, and my father began actively looking at opportunities to emigrate to the U.S. fulltime. I was two years old when we came to the U.S. We landed in New York and changed planes, and I had my first Coca-Cola and kept my parents awake the entire flight from there on to Seattle. I remember my first seven or eight years in [an] apartment building which was largely a place with families with young children, many of whom had emigrated to the U.S. from all kinds of different places.

There was always something slightly contradictory in the goal to assimilate. If my parents, despite their accents, were asked where they were from, they would say Mercer Island, Washington, not the Netherlands. They joined a bowling club and went to a church which had nothing to do with their beliefs. At the same time, when they were with each other or with us, they defaulted to what was most comfortable, and so I learned to speak Dutch at home. Over time the language of the house evolved into something of a Creole of our own spontaneous making, and one didn’t really pay attention to which language was being spoken and where. I made an effort to speak Dutch with my children from when they were born, as part of a specific agreement with my wife. And to this day, I have really only spoken Dutch to my kids except in the presence of their friends or in a broader conversation. To me, it is so automatic; I don’t really think about it. In some ways I feel blessed having two mother tongues.

I always had the sense I had a funny name, and that stood out. And I remember sometimes wishing people could call me Mike or something that I wouldn’t have to explain. I remember resenting being called German. While I feel at home in two cultures and two languages, I never feel entirely at home in either. I live in a space somewhere overlapping in both, but not quite entirely in either. As my career progressed, the fact that I had a sense of the rest of the world and a facility for languages created opportunities for me. And particularly as you progress through large organizations, it’s a distinct feature that picks you out of a crowd. I remember one company I was with: We were headquartered in the U.S. [and] made a tour of operations in Europe, and the president of the company heard me speak five languages over the course of a week. Lo and behold, when the “Head of Europe” role came up, my name popped up in his mind. I have to believe I benefited from something that was inadvertently given to me when I was young.

I’ve been in business, in some form, a little over 30 years. I think there has been a continued transformation in many aspects of American business culture. [There’s] a sincere focus on diversity, for example, which I think at one point was almost out of a sense of obligation and more defensiveness. Businesses that are very successful today understand and appreciate the extraordinary value that being diverse can provide—in having new ideas, in drawing from a larger talent pool, and better identifying and understanding a very diverse consumer or customer base. I think that has been something where I’ve seen real progress in the mindset of business.

[A] sense of timidity or vulnerability is something—that if you’re new to a place, and if your parents are, [and] they are intimidated by a place—that becomes something you need to overcome and have the spirit to be able to see beyond. I think the power of America as a place is you can arrive, and where you’re from or who you are matters so much less than what you do and what you can do. And, in an evolving society where income distribution is more extreme, and where opportunities may be less open (or maybe challenging in different ways), I think it’s so important to communicate the sense of hope and opportunity. That should be part of not just people arriving, but those of us who are already here—recognizing what continues to make America such an exceptional place.